Strategic Management Facebook Strategic Management

Mission and Vision Statement against Organizational Performance

Evaluation of Strategic Goals

Financial Performance of the Organization

Competitive and Market Analysis

Corporate Strategy to Maximize Return to Shareholders

Mergers or Acquisitions as a Viable Strategy

Employee Motivational Techniques

Organizational Existing Strategies' Support to Business Ethics

The world of commerce in the twenty fist century has changed, indeed revolutionized in terms of doing business and making money. The technological innovations and advancement has left an indelible imprint on the ways of operating business functions. Strategic management, in this regard, is one of the approaches that are put into effect by the organizations top management in order to analyze their vital initiatives and performance in the external environment (Thompson, Cram101 Textbook Reviews, Strickland & Gamble, 2006).

Strategic management is an enduring phenomenon that serves as a roadmap to the organization, where it usually evaluates and controls the overall performance of the enterprise periodically to determine the overall success of failure of the strategies and policies. Moreover, the phenomenon of strategic management also entails goal setting and development of strategies after comprehensive assessment of the competition within the industry, so that the company can live up to the expectations of the market. Therefore, it can be stated that strategic management is based on three elements: analysis, decisions and actions of the enterprise to maintain competitive advantages (Thompson, Cram101 Textbook Reviews, Strickland & Gamble, 2006).

While taking into account, a public trading company, Facebook is one of the rising enterprises that have become well-known and popular amongst a huge population with no time. Numerous sources of information have brought the fact to the limelight that Facebook has become one of the largest social networks all over the globe (Facebook, 2012).

Facebook is a social utility that provides an opportunity to the people to connect with a group of friends, families, and colleagues from work life and so forth. Additionally, Facebook is a universal forum that opens the means of communication between individuals not only who are easily reachable, but also with the people who are way far from them. Through the personal profile, the users can exchange messages, update their profile status, posts images and videos, join certain groups (based on common interest) and so on (Facebook, 2012).

Mission and Vision Statement against Organizational Performance

Facebook was initiated and founded by some college students of Harvard University, where the membership was confined to only the students of the university. However, with the success of the social media site at Harvard University, the founders expanded their membership to other university students in the United States. As a consequence, the founders received much positive response and support of the students at other universities, due to which they made it publically open for school students and eventually to general public over 13 years in age (Facebook, 2012).

The founders of Facebook had three principal objectives in mind: the first aim was to make the users closely linked to their friends and families; secondly they intended to provide the users with a platform where they can discover the latest happenings of the world; and thirdly, they wanted the users to have an open forum where they can share and express their opinions, standpoints and feedbacks on various issues. In this regard, the mission statement of the enterprise states "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected" (Facebook, 2012).

Considering the mission and objectives of Facebook, one can noticeably evaluate that the increasing number of active users in the today's time, which has reached a milestone of more than one billion active users according to the recent research study of the Wall Street Journal (Fowler, 2012). This indicates that how rapidly Facebook has achieved its goals in the sector and business industry of social media.

The graph below clearly exhibits the records of the users that has drastically increased over the years and transformed the image of Facebook into well-accepted and recognized enterprise as a social networking site and is considered as a brand of online communication. This is one of the supporting evidences that reveal the success rate of the company with regard to its mission and vision.

(Techtree News Staff, 2008)

While on the other hand, in terms of its revenue, Facebook obtains most of its revenues from its advertising segment, which is quite below than other competitions in the industry. In response to this factor, Facebook is focusing...

This is the only aspect in which the company is lacking; however, it has found and implemented alternative options (numerous applications, mobile connectivity and so on) that can enrich their profit levels and revenues (Fowler, 2012).
Evaluation of Strategic Goals

Facebook is one of the social media companies that have the core focus and attention on the user growth as their primary strategic goal. Furthermore, the company's owners also exhibited that international expansion is another element of their strategic goals, where they can add languages to the service they are providing. This vision is again a narrow scope that can lead them to their ultimate strategic goal of growth. For the company, optimizing revenue was not the core objective, as they wanted more and more people to be connected to Facebook that can connect them to their friends and families (Locke, 2007).

This goal of having more users is closely linked to the company's mission that insists on the connectivity of the people to their friends and family, discover the happenings of the world, and share or express what matters to them (Facebook, 2012). This is only achieved when the users are engaged with Facebook and create their profiles on the company page. According to the company's initial goals, they desired to develop and mature in the international market, as this was a wider platform that can provide them with a good business by having gargantuan amount of users (Locke, 2007).

Facebook owners also pointed out the fact that their strategic goals is to provide the people with a channel that is efficient and effective for the users to communicate and stay in touch, where they can receive as well as share the information with their friends and families. The core emphasis of Facebook has always been on the utility component. In short, Facebook was developed with the prime objective to add value to the lives of the people (Locke, 2007).

Financial Performance of the Organization

On an overall basis, when considering the financial performance of the company, one can evidently notice the fact that Facebook has reached more than nine hundred active users that connect to Facebook on monthly and annually basis and a significant proportion of the users are using Facebook on mobile devices. This indicates that the operational performance of Facebook witnesses an increase of more than twenty five percent on annual basis on daily and monthly active users (Facebook, 2012).

Records also state that users are more engaged with Facebook who are actively suing it via their mobile devices. Sharp increases in the mobile users have been indicated as the operational highlights of the company's performance. This clearly determines the strong connection between the goals and financial performance that is creating greater options for Facebook to introduce new products and improve the overall platform (Facebook, 2012).

The financial highlights, on the other hand, undoubtedly reveal the fact Facebook is experiencing dramatic rise of nearly 30% in the revenues and gaining more profits from the time the company has become a public trading company. The facts and figures of the financial performance of Facebook expose that the company is witnessing sharp rise in its revenues on yearly basis (Facebook, 2012).

This trend of increasing revenues at an unprecedented rate is expected to continue in the coming years, as more and more users are being connected to Facebook. Eventually, the amazing and outstanding financial performance with reference to the strategic goals and objectives is leading the company to become multi-billion dollar company in the near future.

Competitive and Market Analysis

While taking into account the competitive and market analysis, it is prudent to note that MySpace has been the biggest and most challenging competitor of Facebook. However, Orkut and Twitter are few other competitors of Facebook that is being accessed by thousands of users. One of the strengths of Facebook elucidates that it is significantly the leading social networking site and has outshines the major competitor that is MySpace and have millions of active users, which are increasing at an accelerated pace (Sutherland, 2012).

While continuing to expose the strengths of Facebook, one cannot ignore the fact that it is translated into more than sixty languages all over the world, thus caters a huge amount of consumers and the strong user database adds to its strengths. Facebook provides its users with multiple options to interact and connect to the groups of their choice or common interest such as wall posts, private chats and many more while in comparison, other competitors do not provide with such extensive options (Sutherland, 2012).

Numerous applications are also one of the…